Bloch

Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the

soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the

Macedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus,

a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposing

armies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and sent

their lifebloods coursing through each other. Passage was made to India.

The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had been

accumulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers of

the human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did,

there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought

there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The gods of

Greece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges.

Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into an

hundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthians

annihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomans

barred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew

under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango,

the Indias of the Great Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins were

cut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radically

different from the other's, a substance growing more individual with

each elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and West

developed away one from the other.

And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close and

confronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We are

to-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpass the period of

Hellenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramatic

march of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make the

connection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have again

shown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have been

swinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armed

merchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe.

Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeating

the air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in the

infiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with

Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at

Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if

Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it

seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian

letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches, arose apparently only

from the desire for masquerade. Grétry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took

their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the

arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only,

began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the

West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones

and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was

opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new

orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche

Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les

Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than

toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in

"Oberon," Félicien David in his songs and in his "Le Désert" attempted

seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the

Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy of

the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the

first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet,

Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though

the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended

rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came

into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists

and the post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the

arts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose that

is full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly

through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses

were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds

of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral

chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle.

Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.

And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately

assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling,

showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had

long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of

personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood

and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The

very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body

that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at

the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that

prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art

was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be,

significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri

Matisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of which

had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of

Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in

Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of

Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any

really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New

York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the

delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that

carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.

As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in

particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works

of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has

been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed

their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced

setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar

tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the

Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales

and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill

fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was

near.

But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in

that of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer's suite for viola

and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other

gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest

west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through

a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing

power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile

formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid

as mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement is

set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can

put one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time,

this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety

richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the

bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon,

the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his

family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests

with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the

Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The

monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had

hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or

from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through

Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from

a steaming Burmese swamp and exposed to the terrible beat of a New York

thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new

and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a

character distinctly individual, had been created.

For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of

the onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of

the Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. And

he is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentally

self-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully accepted

themselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and

stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were

"homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeers

and Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that,

inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. The

weakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of the

spiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself.

There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, a

secret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf to

the promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racial

soil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn of

impulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish"

music, utilize solely racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish

extraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open before

him. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, is

necessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He

must not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realization

because they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony.

The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "whole

man" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hitherto

represented "Judaism in Music." An inhibited, harried impulse is

manifest in their art.

For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings,

they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to a

taste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they

tried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance,

and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world so

much as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a pretty

salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried,

with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria." Some, no doubt, would have

preferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is an

example. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method was

a trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions,

sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not realize that the

couch was the comfortable German _canapé,_ the cushions the romantic

style of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the

"Sabæan odors from the spicy shore

Of Araby the blest"

there drifted the doubtlessly very appetizing smell of Viennese cookery.

But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an

authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his

that is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than

the synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and

color that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music the

harsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures

of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created the

race and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternal

Egypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this music

makes one feel as though an element that had remained unchanged

throughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and by

which every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in it

and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are the

very impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make it

seem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court of the

king had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114th

Psalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the passage of the Red

Sea, the very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance. The

voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have

called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's

22nd Psalm?

And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation

of the third of the "Poèmes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters

his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity

of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."

Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to

erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts

itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly

limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first

movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old

Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its

flowing voices.

Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these

sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts,

bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged

bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its

pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis.

Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line

of the synagogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pure

inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, after

all, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch's melodic

line, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes,

approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like so

much of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one can

conceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like

the melodic line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in the

setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also,

might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. The

unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at

once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric

Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of

Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous

rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and

tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European

music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite

like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work,

has ever before appeared.

And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Bloch

spoke his proper language. The works that precede the "Trois Poèmes

juives," the first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is

consciously made, do not really represent the man as he is. No doubt,

the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose

verve and passion and vigor make the composer of "L'Apprenti sorcier"

seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of the

string quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of the

symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and

Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth," written

a few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer was

twenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives the

melodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by Edmond

Flegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that the

composer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and

Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch

in the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches

"Hiver-Printemps," in the mournful English horn against the harp in

"Hiver," in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps."

Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward.

But with the "Trois Poèmes juives," the original Bloch is at hand. These

compositions were conceived at first as studies for "Jezabel," the opera

Bloch intended composing directly after he had completed the scoring of

"Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, "Jezabel" still exists only in the libretto

of Flegg and in the series of sketches deposited in the composer's

portfolio. The moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him to

realize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at first to follow

directly upon "Macbeth," "Jezabel" promises fairly to become the goal of

his first great creative period. But out of the conception of the opera

itself, out of the desire of creating a work around this Old

Testamentary figure, out of the train of emotion excited by the project,

there have already flowed results of a first magnitude for Bloch and for

modern music. For in the process of searching out a style befitting this

biblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it,

Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in the

company of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo,"

"Israel," portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in the

direction marked out by the "Trois Poèmes juives." "Jezabel" has turned

out to be one of those dreams that lead men on to the knowledge of

themselves.

And yet, the "Jewish composer" that the man is so often said to be, he

most surely is not. He is too much the man of his time, too much the

universal genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His art

succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that

of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the great

European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain.

Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of

the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to

Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of

any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his

magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of

the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic

warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys

and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the

finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of

Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in

temperate skies. It is only that as a Jew it was necessary for Ernest

Bloch to say yea to his own heredity before his genius could appear. And

to what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from the intensity with

which his age mirrors itself in the music he has already composed. His

music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess of

the human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. For

Ernest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick spawning life, its

ferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still

here. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousands

of years of development necessary to make a sapient creature of man.

And he writes like one who has been plunged into a darkness and sadness

and bitterness all the greater for the vision of the rainbow that has

been given him, for the glimpse he has had of the "pays du soleil," the

land of man lifting himself at last from the brute and becoming human.

For he knows too well that only aeons after he is dead will the night

finally pass.

And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of East and West is

illuminated by what he does. The coloration of his orchestra, the cries

of his instruments, the line of his melody, the throbbing of his pulses,

make us feel the great tide sweeping us on, the wave rolling over all

the world. In his art, we feel the earth itself turning toward the light

of the East.